@coliver said in Easy and Quick Imaging Solution:

@stacksofplates said in Easy and Quick Imaging Solution:

We do Kickstart installs. It's pretty easy.

Kickstart with some form of change management tool (ansible?) Would probably be the best bet.

Yeah that's what we do. Ansible builds the kickstart configs and PXE boot files from a YAML dictionary that defines all of the systems.

@thwr said in Disk imaging tools:

@nadnerb said in Disk imaging tools:

Macrium Reflect

Ah, thank you. Macrium Reflect was the product I couldn't remember. It worked very well for someone I knew when he was in a similar situation.

Anyway, I will probably use clonezilla again

+1 one for Macrium Reflect as the best easy way to go about it (I've had some unsuccessful Clonezilla attempts before). In my experience with Acronis, you can't cherry pick partitions (like the OEM recovery partition) at clone time, but you can with Macrium Reflect.

@dustinb3403 said in Cross Post - Restoring Windows 7 Image Without a Repair disk or Installation Media:

@Dashrender

@ezacal said in Cross Post - Restoring Windows 7 Image Without a Repair disk or Installation Media:

@dustinb3403 I appreciate the recommendation of alternate imaging software and i personally would love to use them but my mission is to get the VHDs stored in the windows image to transfer over directly to a blank HDD, no matter the method used the windows image must be the source of the restoration.

This is the issue here. He is stating he must use Windows Recovery to restore the operating system.

Not sure of why or what requirement this is other than

@ezacal said in Cross Post - Restoring Windows 7 Image Without a Repair disk or Installation Media:

@dustinb3403 ah yes i neglected to mention we are able to clone the drive via clonezilla but a lot of the times the users have to continue work while we send out a new drive, so as of now i only have a windows image to work with, with the constraint of not being able to use a repair disk

Where he says the users have to be able to use their systems.

Which the answer to this is an Agent based backup solution (Veeam Endpoint, UrBackup etc) can all write to remote storage and can be written to new drives that then get sent out to the user to physically remove the hard drive from their system to install this "restored image".

There are potential issues with this. Restoring a computer image that's 3 months old could easily find a situation where the restore has a different computer password with the network, etc.

It s good advices to Sysprep for windows 7

FYI - to get into a Volume License agreement with Microsoft, you must purchase 5 licenses to start. Any 5. For example 5 Windows desktops Software Assurance licenses.

The cheapest option that I am currently aware of is 4 Windows Server CALs and a single Windows Desktop upgrade or SA.

Going to have a play once the VL has been added.

@NetworkNerd said:

How do they know you are using the one volume license for imaging and not re-using it over and over illegally?

They don't, but as that is generally how it is used, it's not a flag.